“McClatchy has done yeoman’s work with both selection and editing, and Library of America was right to inaugurate its American Poets Project with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Fashions in literature, like those in couture, keep coming back, as she, if she hasn’t already, surely will.”—John Simon, The New Criterion

Praised by poets and critics ranging from A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy to Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bold, exquisite poems take their place among the enduring verse of the twentieth century. Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries—and readers ever since—with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance, and often mischievous wit.

J. D. McClatchy’s introduction and selections offer new and surprising insights into Millay’s achievement. Included are her most beloved and justly admired poems, such as the wry bohemian anthem “Recuerdo” and the sonnet sequence Fatal Interview, the poetic record of a love affair that is presented in its entirety. McClatchy has also chosen works that extend our sense of Millay’s range: translations, her play Aria da Capo, and excerpts from her libretto The King’s Henchman.

“I have for the most part been guided by my taste for Millay at her tautest and truest,” writes McClatchy. “There are precise and resonant images everywhere.”

J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Table of Contents

Introduction by J. D. McClatchy

Ifrom Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
Renascence
Interim
Afternoon on a Hill
Witch-Wife
When the Year Grows Old
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”
“If I should learn, in some quite casual way”
Bluebeard

from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
First Fig
Second Fig
Recuerdo
To the Not Impossible Him
Grown-up
Daphne
Midnight Oil
The Philosopher
“I think I should have loved you presently”
“I shall forget you presently, my dear”

from Second April (1921)
Eel-Grass
Elegy Before Death
Weeds
Passer Mortuus Est
Alms
Inland
Ebbfrom Memorial to D. C.
I. Epitaph
IV. Dirge
V. Elegy
“Only until this cigarette is ended”
“Once more into my arid days like dew”
“When I too long have looked upon your face”
“And you as well must die, beloved dust”
“As to some lovely temple, tenantless”
Wild Swans

from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923)
Autumn Chant
Feast
The Betrothal
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Never May the Fruit Be Plucked
Hyacinth
To One Who Might Have Borne a Message
“Love is not blind. I see with single eye”
“Pity me not because the light of day”
“Here is a wound that never will heal, I know”
“Your face is like a chamber where a king”
“I, being born a woman and distressed”
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
“How healthily their feet upon the floor”
“Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”
Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree

from The Buck in the Snow (1928)
To the Wife of a Sick Friend
To a Friend Estranged from Me
The Buck in the Snow
Evening on Lesbos
Dirge Without Music
Lethe
To Inez Mulholland
To Jesus on His Birthday
“Not that it matters, not that my heart’s cry”

IIAria da Capo (1919)

from The King’s Henchman (1927)
Aelfrida’s Song
Love Scene

translations from Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (1936)
The Fang
Parisian Dream
Invitation to the Voyage
The Old Servant
Late January
The King of the Rainy Country
Mists and Rains
A Memory

IIIFatal Interview (1931)

IVfrom Wine from These Grapes (1934)
Valentine
In the Grave No Flower
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
The Solid Sprite Who Stands Alone
Spring in the Garden
Sonnet (“Time, that renews the tissues of this frame”)
Desolation Dreamed Of
On the Wide Heath
Two Sonnets in Memory
Conscientious Objector
Epitaph for the Race of Man

from Conversation at Midnight (1937)
“Thus are our altars polluted; nor may we flee. The walls are strong”
“The mind thrust out of doors”

from Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
The Snow Storm
Not So Far as the Forest
“Fontaine, Je Ne Boirai Pas De Ton Eau!”
The True Encounter
Czecho-Slovakia
Underground System
Two Voices
This Dusky Faith
To a Young Poet
To Elinor Wylie
“Now that the west is washed of clouds and clear”
“I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex”
“Thou famished grave, I will not fill thee yet”
“Not only love plus awful grief”

from Make Bright the Arrows (1940)
“Make bright the arrows”
An Eclipse of the Sun Is Predicted
“Gentlemen Cry, Peace!”
“I must not die of pity; I must live”

from The Murder of Lidice (1942)
“They marched them out to the public square”

from Mine the Harvest (1954)
Small Hands, Relinquish All
Ragged Island
“To whom the house of Montagu”
“The courage that my mother had”
Armenonville
Dream of Saba
For Warmth Alone, for Shelter Only
“Black hair you’d say she had”
Steepletop
“Look how the bittersweet with lazy muscle moves aside”
“Those hours when happy hours were my estate”
“Not to me, less lavish-though my dreams have been splendid”
“Tranquility at length, when autumn comes”
Sonnet in Dialectic
“It is the fashion now to wave aside”
“Admetus, from my marrow’s core I do”
“I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”
“And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you”
“Felicity of Grief!-even Death being kind”
“If I die solvent-die, that is to say”

Biographical NoteNote on the TextsNotesIndex of Titles and First Lines